Bob Dylan, in "Meet Me in the Morning," repeats the old adage: "they say the darkest hour/ is right before the dawn." And indeed, Dylan knows darkness. But this is an early song: it implies hope.

There is a darker hour, however, for those who know that the dawn can not bring comfort.

Edgar gets a dose of this in King Lear, when, betrayed by his brother Edmund (who has tricked their father into thinking the virtuous Edgar is plotting against him), he has to run -- followed by the hounds as in the Dylan song, disguised as a beggar, a hobo. What he witnesses during his long night's journey into dawn is repeated betrayal, madness, and destitution.

Edgar takes on the identity of "mad Tom" -- saying that he has escaped from Bedlam (the common corruption of the name of the Bethlehem Hospital in London that housed the insane). This gives him leave to attend on the enraged and despairing Lear, who has been locked out by his daughters on a night so cold and storm-wracked, says Cordelia, that "Mine enemy's dog,/ Though he had bit me, should have stood that night/ Against my fire."

Not promising.

It makes Edgar think over his previous misconceptions about what hardship is, at any rate. He makes it through this storm, this night that the Fool, or court jester, affirmed would turn them all to fools and madmen. But just when he thinks his fortunes have weathered this and could only get better ("the worst returns to laughter") -- just, in fact, when he believes that things could not get any worse -- they do.

Hey -- it's a tragedy, what was he thinking?

He sees his betrayed father, Gloucester, who has had both his eyes plucked out by the treacherous Cornwall (egged on by the ever-bloodthirsty Regan, one of the king's daughters). The old man, blinded, wretched, stumbling, wants to go to Dover -- so he can throw himself off the cliff there.

Edgar realizes that he as yet knows very little about suffering, after all:

O gods! Who is't can say 'I am at the worst'?

I am worse than e'er I was.[. . .]

And worse I may be yet: the worst is not

So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'

What the villains learn in this play (to be simplistic about it) is that bad deeds are rightfully punished sooner or later. What the "virtuous" learn, though, is rather more complex, and the first lesson is a tough one.

While the "evil" characters border on the comedic exaggeration of medieval Morality plays, where two-dimensional bad guys say "bwua-ha-ha!" with a cheerful sneer (indeed, getting them all killed off neatly in Act Five becomes a bit of a game, as Regan has to poison Goneril and then stab herself to get it all over with), the others first have to learn that they aren't really completely virtuous or good.

• Cordelia pisses her father off and gets herself exiled.
• Kent, after likewise angering the king and being banished, insults a courtier with the most fluent stream of expletive invective possible, and spends a couple of scenes in the stocks (this one is comic relief, compared to the rest).
• Lear has to realize that it wasn't simply the crown that made him a king, and that a king is not necessarily automatically "right."
  
• Gloucester has to learn to judge a man by his deeds, not by his words.
• Edgar has to realize the nature of true suffering.

Why? Why do all these folk have to have everything stripped from them, and why should Shakespeare make their fates so bleak?

The darkest hour? Perhaps the darkest hour is the hour in which you finally realize that the next one might well be even darker, and there's nothing you can do about it. The moment you can let go of all vestige of control and accept the darkness, transcendence is possible.

Bear with me -- this is not an nihilistic treatise on the pointlessness of existence; quite the opposite. And if we continue to use Shakespeare's play as an example, then we can see the breakthrough from each character's darkest hour into some kind of light.

But before we do so, take a moment to review the names of the people you know who are really, truly, honestly happy. No -- seriously: take some time with this. Ready?

You'll notice they all have one circumstance in common: they've been in their own darkest hour, and have managed to come back.

Let's look at what Shakespeare does to two of his characters in this play, Gloucester and Lear. They both end up dead, of couse. But before they shuffle off this mortal coil, they have moments of pure happiness.

Is that all there is? you ask.

What else did you want? A big musical number?

Gloucester, led to an imaginary Dover Cliff (Edgar isn't about to let his blind father really jump), suffers an imaginary "fall" and is "restored" at the bottom of the precipice. He's a superstitious old pagan, so his son tells him he must have been saved by magic. Well and good.

The point would be an implicitly Christian one for Shakespeare's audience, as we are not to devise our own ends, etc. -- but it is not stated as such in the play (Shakespeare chose to set the action in ancient Pagan Britain because there was some silly edict in place for a few years in England forbidding the mention of God onstage). Interpret it as you will.

Then Gloucester, having just learned that the good son he had kicked out and hunted down like a dog is really the good guy who rescued him under the cliff, promptly dies under a tree. But "his heart," we are told later by Edgar, "'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly." This is the achievement of the Aristotelian Golden Mean -- a temperance much admired by Christian, Hindu, Muslim, ________ (your favorite brand of thinking here).

But that's not the real lesson yet, even. Lear himself takes the process one step further; for, if Gloucester has shown us how to die, Lear has to show us how to live. Before he gets to finally snuff it, of course.

He is old ("fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less"). He has given orders all his life. It isn't until he abdicates that he must realize that other folk don't live as well as he has (minor digression: remember the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in a field -- peasant #1 says: "'e's the king." Peasant #2: "'Ow do ya know?" Peasant #1: "Because 'e's not all covered in shit!").

On the heath, during the storm, he stops giving orders (after his initial rage and injunction that the storm can go ahead and rain on him, see if he cares. Like, childish, much?) -- and starts asking after the health and wellbeing of others. Then, the next day, he is reunited with the daughter he recklessly banished -- but their reunion is interrupted when they are taken prisoner by the rebel forces (led by Gloucester's other son and Lear's other two daughters).

But he is not disheartened. The truth is, at this point he would rather live in a prison with the daughter he had so foolishly exiled. Prison would be a step up from where he has just been -- completely, utterly, and disconsolately abandoned and punished by the elements as well as his own inner torments -- the realizations he has made about his many mistakes and misconceptions.

When is the darkest hour?  It's the hour before you realize that the darkness doesn't matter.

It's how much light you have inside yourself that will let you respond to the darkness around you.  Again, you can interpret it as you will: it works from any angle, whether your mindset be grounded in religion or existentialism or Techno-Paganism.  

But one clear distinction must be made: it's not blind faith.  "Blind faith" denotes an abdication of will, and can border on senseless optimism if taken too far.  

The reality is that, whatever philosophy you follow, embracing the darkness is liberating.